An ever-changing industry grows and blooms

8 August 2018

Martin Cullingford writes:

Every year, around this time, I report back from the annual gathering of the classical industry at the Classical:NEXT conference. Bringing labels, distributors, innovators and artists together always breeds good ideas, goodwill and a better, shared understanding of where, as an industry, we are heading.

Year after year, the constant is the extraordinary commitment to brilliant music-making. But much else continues to change. Streaming continues to offer both opportunity and challenge. According to the latest figures from the UK record industry body the BPI, streaming is increasing massively, from 200 million weekly streams in early 2014 to 1 billion at the end of 2016 (that’s just in the UK, though across all genres). People are paying for it too. There are now ......